Editors Note: This post was originally posted a few years ago and was lost but eventually recovered, however without pictures (where applicable).

By Jeffery Wood | February 25, 2010

Did you know there’s a character in an action movie that could have been modeled after me? Honest. His name was Marcus Brody and he is one of the main characters in the movie: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I don’t remember how it goes exactly so I’ll tell you the scenes where the resemblance is best expressed in paraphrase form. Indiana Jones, his dad and Marcus are searching for the Holy Grail. Marcus gets separatedfrom them, Indy and his dad get captured by the Nazis and Marcus is alone in Egypt. During the interrogation, the Nazis tell Indy that they will find Marcus. Indy tells them that they are wasting their time because Marcus knows the culture and customs like the back of his hand, is a master of disguise, and speaks the language fluently. He will disappear into the background and they’ll never find him.

After Indy and his dad escape, Indy stresses that they need to find Marcus before the Nazis do. His dad says, “But all those things you said” and Indy says, “Oh come on dad, Marcus gets lost in his own museum!” In the next scene, sure enough there’s Marcus wearing his business suit (I don’t remember if it was grey or a light blue) wandering out in the streets looking lost and standing out like a sore thumb.

Yup, that’s me, the guy who gets lost in his own museum.

Seriously.

I get easily turned around and more than once I’ve been standing there right outside a mall store’s bathroom looking foolish because I got lost. I don’t quite remember the labyrinth of turns I made to find the bathroom in the first place. I’m not entirely sure what happens to the thought processes that are supposed to notice where things are at. These are the very things your brain uses as landmarks to guide you back from whence you came. Regardless, it doesn’t happen all the time of course and when it does it varies in severity from momentarily confused all the way down to completely and hopelessly lost.

Do you ever get that way? Oh it doesn’t have to be physically lost. You can become mentally lost, emotionally lost, spiritually lost, lost in your relationship or lost in your business. If you’ve been around my blog for a while you know that not too long ago I completely changed my business model. At some point after that I got myself lost. Oh it’s not anything to do with the business model I chose per se, it’s one day I woke up and as I thought about my business I thought to myself, “What are you doing? This isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Why are you mucking around with this and that when you should have been over here doing these things?”

I had gotten lost in my own museum. I wasn’t focused, what I was working on didn’t match my goals and my goals were out of line with what I actually wanted. Sometimes I long for the old days when all I had to do to make my problems go away was to bury myself in cartoons. I remember it like it was yesterday…oh wait…that was yesterday. 🙂

This is one of the reasons that people going into business are advised to come up with a mission statement. You can use it as a lighthouse to make sure that your goals are consistent with the direction that you wanted to take your business in when you started. The mission statement helps keep you from sinking your ship on the rocks. This is also why I (and others) advise that if you are striking out in setting something up for a business, that you pick one thing and work on it until you get it right. If you jump from here to there to something else eventually you are going to walk out of the bathroom, look around at all the unfamiliar things that you swore were not there when you walked into the bathroom, and say to yourself, “Where am I?” Lost in your own museum.

This can happen if your business is too broad. There’s so much stuff that it’s hard to narrow it down and focus on something and go back to the “bigger picture” later. You can’t see the trees because the forest got in the way. Of course it’s also possible to have too narrow of a focus. I’m not talking about micro-niches, though that’s in the direction I’m going, I’m talking about things that have the proverbial shelf-life, something you set up that won’t run on forever because it falls out of popularity for one reason or another.

For example, sites that pop up over trends like the Rubik’s Cube, the latest American Idol contestant, or the newest flash-in-the-pan band or even anything that has a limited time frame. Take the blog I mentioned in the last post, Match Dot Wrong It’s about the joys and pitfalls of online dating (and I didn’t do a very good job of telling you about it, she probably hates me now, but I digress).

Her blog’s mission is simple: Chronicle the joys and pitfalls of her attempts at online dating. Everything she’s doing is focused, every goal she sets stays true to her mission statement (she didn’t actually create a mission statement, I’m trying to make a point here, work with me), and she faithfully (as far as I know) records what she did, what she thought, and why. She isn’t walking out of the dating bathroom, looking around and saying, “How did I get here?” (I mean in relation to her blog, not her dating life), she knows her museum like the back of her hand.

However, sooner or later One-Click Wonder (the name she calls herself on her blog) will finally find her match. Her blog will have now outlived it’s usefulness. Oh sure, she could keep chronicling the relationship with her eventual boyfriend BUT that would no longer be holding true to her (non-existent) mission statement. Now it is a personal blog and she can do with it whatever she wants, there’s no right or wrong in her case, I’m just trying to make a business application here, plus give her another link for the search engines. I’m a hopeless romantic myself and a big softie to boot.

It’s just an easy example of a blog (or a website) that has a shelf-life. It will only last for a limited amount of time before it becomes totally obsolete. If One-Click Wonder actually wanted to keep true to the mission statement (that I made up), she could morph her blog into one about online dating experiences in general and not just her own online dating experiences.

Now you can make a lot of money with trends and fads and you never know if that American Idol contestant will become a huge star or if that flash-in-the-pan band will go on to be considered one of the “greats”, but that’s all about timing and knowing what you’re doing. I’m not saying, “Don’t do it” I’m saying “Don’t put all your hopes in it”. A blog about cooking Italian cuisine will outlive a blog about an Italian cooking show. Sooner or later that show will go off the air and the blog followers will stop coming.

Your mission statement will accommodate how you handle trends and fads. You’ll either avoid them, focus on them, or just include them in your arsenal. Those kinds of sites can take an intense amount of work over a brief period of time (especially if there’s breaking news about it) but the flip side is that if you monetize it right, it’s worth it. Either way, you won’t get lost. I’m still looking around trying to figure out what to do with the pieces I’ve managed to create. I threw away the box with the picture that was supposed to guide me on putting this jigsaw puzzle together.

Going back to college isn’t helping. It’s a huge time-suck and I under-estimated the amount of time I’d be spending doing school work. Stay focused, leave yourself a trail of bread crumbs, write out a mission statement or whatever else it is you need to do to keep you from getting lost. One-Click Wonder knows what she’s all about, so should you.

– Jeffery